Things Not Otherwise Noted: February Edition

It’s great to see all of you here for our monthly meeting of the Media-Integrity Deprivation Society. Since an awful lot of news isn’t reported in any of the mainstream media outlets, we try to get to as much of it as we can.

Yes, you in the back in the suit. Your question.

Why is the administration wasting time on gun control?

That’s an interesting question. Obama undoubtedly wants to capitalize on the shootings at Sandy Hook to restrict guns, but no one really knows why, and certainly no one in the media has bothered to ask what his real motivation is.

As we all know, what the President says has very little to do with what he really is going to do, and nothing at all to do with his real motivation. The best I can tell you is that it fits the liberal/progressive worldview: only a privileged few should be entitled to power and anything that gives the masses any semblance of power should be restricted or eliminated.

That means the guys in government don’t trust you and want you only for votes and taxes.

By the way, an internal Justice Department memo has been leaked which clearly states that most of what is being labeled as gun control by the President and his cronies will not work and will have no effect on the level of crime.

But it is a great distraction from the real issues of the day and allows the peer-group poseurs in the media to congratulate themselves by writing about such an emotional issue and by pretending they are on the morally superior side.

I know there has been a lot of noise in the Internet world about bullet purchases by the Department of Homeland Security, along with the acquisition of armored vehicles that are showing up in a lot of small town police departments. These stories have triggered the black-helicopter crowd and caused shortages of guns and ammo throughout the country.

Nothing like a good government-takeover scare to cause stockpiling.

I’m surprised the mainstream media hasn’t latched onto this to claim that gun and ammo manufacturers caused these rumors to increase demand. But when all is said and done, this has more to do with bureaucratic bumbling and inefficiency than anything else. DHS is buying in bulk on a multi-year contract and the same goes for the Social Security Administration and NOAA and other agencies. These guys have to spend their budgets every year or they get smaller. So, parties, bullets, vacations, whatever. The miracle of baseline budgeting means the money will get spent, whether efficiently or not. The same is true for the armored vehicles. DHS wastes a ton of money on grants to local agencies for stuff they don’t need and wouldn’t get otherwise; but hey, they figure it’s free money and has to be spent.

Yeah, the guy in the front row with the UAW jacket. The sequester you ask. Is it really going to cause all the damage the President claims?

Unfortunately , there is hyperbole and then there is Barak Obama in full media manipulation mode. The friendly idiots at the misleadingly named Plain Dealer have bobbleheaded along by publishing front page articles that do nothing but reprint Democrat talking points about the looming crises that will be attributable to the sequester.

Quick question for a moment. Who here thinks our federal government is efficient? Nobody? I see one guy in the back with a beer and an Obama t-shirt raising his hand. Oh, and he’s got one, no two, no five free cell phones from the government. Well, he is entitled to an opinion, even if, at the moment, it might not be very intelligible.

Still, everyone else here knows that our government is a gargantuan monster riddled with waste, inefficiency, cronyism, and outright fraud. So, cutting $85 billion this year from an overall budget of $3.7 trillion should not be something that keeps anyone awake at night. Especially since really only $44 billion of that will actually be reduced in 2013.

And, let’s be clear. What we are talking about are not cuts; they are simply reductions in the rate of growth of the federal budget. The Democrats squeak and squeal about cuts when really what is meant is slowing down growth. Even after sequester, the budget will be larger than last year and will be 30% larger than it was in 2007. What is so hard about this?

I know you haven’t heard about it, but Senator Tom Coburn sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget stating that all of the dreaded sequester cuts could come in duplicative and overlapping positions and agencies. I know you’re all shocked. What, multiple agencies doing the same thing and draining our money? I know, what a surprise. In his letter Senator Coburn stated that the Government Accountability Office has identified over 1,300 programs costing $365 billion – every single year. Doesn’t seem like it would take much to chop some of those programs and begin making a good down payment on reducing the deficit would it?

In addition, the President’s own staff has identified almost $3 billion in fraud in the food stamp program, and $62 billion in fraud and waste in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. We know there is more to be found. Lot’s more. For instance, that wonderful free cell phone program funded by your taxes on your cell phone bills. Recent studies have shown at least 40% of those phones go to people who don’t need them. Sometimes multiple times. There is no coordination and no cross-referencing and no justification required. But this President isn’t interested in solving problems, only exacerbating them in the service of his agenda of “remaking America.”

Former Senator Phil Gramm, who knows a thing or two about budgets and sequesters, wrote an article about the effects of the 1985 sequester in the The Wall Street Journal. You mean you don’t remember the 1985 sequester? It did happen, and guess what? Airplanes didn’t fall out of the sky then either. Senator Gramm wrote “For a typical American family that earns less than it did in the year President Obama was elected, the anguished cries and dark predictions coming out of the White House should elicit not sympathy but revulsion.” That’s not politics, that’s honesty. He ended his article by noting “Governing isn’t about blaming someone else. It is about choosing.”

Just before the sequester kicked in the Republicans in the House submitted not one but two bills which would have given the President flexibility in deciding where to reduce spending rather than across-the-board cuts. Obfuscating Obama threatened to veto them. This isn’t leadership, it’s politics and posturing. And we all lose.

I’m sorry, the young woman with the child on her lap. I love your daughter’s outfit, ma’am. It isn’t often one sees one so young sporting a Grateful Dead shirt. How wonderful to learn about the classics at so early an age.

Yes, ma’am, I know the media is not reporting any of this and yes, that is very disturbing.

The problem is that members of the media now pretty much all belong to the liberal, smug, self-aggrandizing morally superior wing of the Democrat Party. They are not journalists. They are political advocates.

An exception Is Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame. He is certainly neither a Republican nor a conservative sympathizer, but he does not let his political instincts override his journalistic ones. He still wants to get the story, not posture and try to look good. He wrote in a Washington Post column that “…months of White House dissembling further eroded any semblance of trust between Obama and congressional Republicans.” Note the reference to dissembling by Obama, because the media casts the problem as one of either intransigence by Republicans or the inability of both sides to agree.

The media would also have you believe that the administration was forced into the sequester deal and that Obama suffers from Republican unwillingness to deal with the problem by raising taxes. The truth, as is so often the case with our obsessively dishonest President, is different. Woodward wrote that sequester included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester. None, zip, zilch. Our President is simply making it all up because he knows that the media isn’t interested in truth.

Woodward is now being attacked by those very same media with claims of senility, lying and distortions. Hardly. They just don’t like someone telling the truth because it clarifies how dishonest Obama is – and how easily duped the media can be.

Speaking of our overwhelmingly left-wing media, Juan Williams is an annoyingly liberal commentator who got fired from NPR for being politically incorrect and has found a home as a commentator on Fox News. He recently commented that “…it is big media institutions who are identifiably more liberal to left-leaning who will shut you down, stab you and kill you, fire you, if they perceive that you are not telling the story in the way that they want it told.”

That is it, in a nutshell, from one who knows and is certainly never going to be confused with a conservative.

Look, folks, I know there is a lot more to discuss about what isn’t being told out there, but once again we have more issues than time. Thanks for being here and I look forward to seeing you next month.

Doug Magill is a freelance writer and voice-over talent. He can be reached at doug@magillmedia.net